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The Many, Many Missing Passports at Immigration
posted (June 29, 2017)
The Senators also asked Pacheco about a separate security concern that the Auditor General brought up in her reports.

Her audit says that there are hundreds of passports which are missing, and possibly stolen, yet, the Department did not keep a careful record of them.

Her audit shows that there are 500 which her team knows for certain were stolen in 2004. Then, there are 50 more were stolen but those have been accounted for. There are also about 681 more which are unaccounted for, and may have been stolen; nobody knows for sure.

The auditors checked into the passport ID numbers of the stolen passports and realized that the Department performed passport renewals for several of them. That shouldn't have happened, and so, the Senators wanted to know why nobody realized that this happened. Here's how Pacheco answered those questions:

Hon. Mark Lizarraga
"There is a list of stolen ordinary and jumbo passports as well as unaccounted 4 passports listed here by the auditor general. Unaccounted for she register and stolen 500, unaccounted and issue 300, 30, 25, 100, 26, 25, 25 down the line. There is a whole list of passports that are listed. There is one issued without the issuing officer of the recipient Ady, or A or M were recorded in pencil where signature if recipient belong. Total 3,713 passports issued over the years where the auditor general. The first page definitely many were missing. Now you are a member of staff, why was staff not alerted to the stolen passports and what efforts you were involve in if any to recover them, because it's not one instance, its many instances. And I ask you earlier about the 200 that you were assigned. You care to comment on the other passports?"

Ady Pacheco
"They were probably stolen, misplaced during a period of time. You'd have to see what time periods those were."

Hon. Mark Lizarraga
"The auditor general cites and the reason I am asking you is because over a period of time these were missing, misplaced, lost, some spoilt ones were even recorded, came back into the system and I'm trying in your experience having been there so long. What it is that the department did to inform officers like yourself 'look we have to be careful about there.'"

Ady Pacheco
"They did nothing to keep informing or to - what they could have done when the electronic system came into effect, they could have entered all of this information in there, so that people could be on the lookout for them. Without that there is no way of me or any of the other persons working there to know with certainty that this passport that's coming in for renewal was among any that had been stolen before, especially if that was a long time ago."

The Senate Hearings continue next week Wednesday.

Today's edition of the Guardian Newspaper reports that the hearings cost the government $15,000 per session. The newspaper add that since November, when the hearings started, the Government has already spent half a million dollars in expenses for it.

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